Despite having little news experience, Bari Weiss was installed as the editor in chief of CBS News, which gave American TV audiences Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. 

Bari Weiss’s appointment as editorial chief of CBS News has touched off a wave of indignation. The venom is especially bitter on the left, which Weiss has built her career targeting for derision. 

Already, a 2019 Vanity Fair profile described the brash, 35-year-old right-leaning “provocateur” from the New York Times opinion section as “a social-media lightning rod,” a gentle run-up to the recent appraisal in the liberal Current Affairs magazine headlined, “Why we all hate Bari Weiss so much.”

Whether Weiss deserves the opprobrium is a reasonable question, though puzzling over her thin qualifications seems reasonable, too. Admirers can point out that she was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the Times. Plus, she co-created, after jumping from the Times in 2020 to protest lockstep liberalism, an opinion-driven, left-bashing news site called the Free Press, which she just sold for a dazzling $150 million as part of her CBS package. That said, she has almost no news experience and had, until earlier this month, done nothing in television except watch it.

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In this way, Weiss is emblematic of the transformations in the business of news that the Trump era has wrought. With a resume as little more than a rancorous pamphleteer, she’s now at the helm of a network long considered a paragon of the journalism mainstream, with a nearly century-long reputation for integrity and civic worth as the........

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